French Regulators Want the Right to Be Forgotten to Include .com

We have written before about Google and their battle with certain European countries on the “right to be forgotten”. Google has contended that results should only be removed from the local country code results, so if someone from France makes a request, then the results no longer show on Google.fr.

The E.U. would like to see the results removed from everywhere including Google.com. Google does not see things that way and has argued removal should be on the local level.

Recently Google made an appeal in France on this very matter, according to Silicon Republic the French regulators (CNIL) are not in agreement. They want to see global removal under the right to be forgotten.

From the article:

The CNIL’s decision arose from an informal appeal by Google. Google lodged an appeal against the CNIL’s previous ruling that Google must apply the right to be forgotten globally. Google claimed that applying the right to be forgotten globally would inhibit the public’s right to information and would constitute censorship.

The CNIL rejected Google’s appeal. In stark language, the CNIL stated that once a right to be forgotten request satisfied the criteria set out by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the Working Party, the removal of the search results must be applied across all versions of the search engine.

The finding by the CNIL that a US company is required to remove search results on its US targeted .com domain is likely to give rise to much debate. This is primarily due to the fact that it shows, in stark terms, the clash between EU privacy law and US law, particularly the First Amendment.

Google will face sanctions if they don’t comply with the request to remove on a global level. The last part of what I quoted is what I think is the most interesting with these cases. We are talking about laws within certain borders vs laws within other borders, the Internet knows no borders and makes all these cases very tricky.